Give the gift of LIFE! Support the Population Research Institute!

Thanks to everyone who has given so far to our End of Year Campaign! We still have a long way to go to reach our goal! If everyone reading this gives $10 we can reach our $125,000 goal long before the clock strikes midnight on December 31!

The year 2018 has been significant for PRI in protecting mothers and their unborn babies. Your support has helped bring an ultrasound to our family care center in Nigeria, produced a petition telling the UN, abortion is NOT a human right, and strengthened family values globally through our educational efforts. Over 500,000 visitors have already come here to find answers this year, a record year for pop.org! And, our social media outreach has brought the pro-life message of hope to millions, another record for you and your work with us!

None of this could have happened without you. And now more than ever, we need to make 2019 the strongest year to date for the pro-life movement. With the momentum now on our side, will you join with us in this work to protect life from conception till natural death?

The End of America—as America

Michael SchuttloffelOctober 15, 2013

Editor’s Note: G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “Tolerance is the last virtue of a man without principle.” The godless secularists demand that people of faith tolerate all manner of evil, and in return they give us nothing except what Blessed John Paul called “a thinly disguised totalitarianism.”

America remains the home of the brave—if you doubt that, google the name Michael Monsoor—but is it still the land of the free? This question is ever more on the minds of religious Americans, who are very much on the defensive these days.

The first line of the First Amendment is dedicated to the protection of religious freedom, and religious freedom was widely understood at the time of the Founding to be one of the very pillars of the American project. But times have changed. The culture is now openly hostile towards religion and religious people. The First Amendment has been turned on its head, being widely misunderstood now as protecting the public square from unwanted religious influences.

In the contemporary mind, religious freedom is nothing more than the freedom of private worship. This line of thinking holds that as long as you are not dragged off to jail in handcuffs for going to Sunday Mass, your religious freedom has been respected. However, the freedom to live one’s faith in daily life as a full participant in society—in other words, the freedom to exercise one’s religion (see the First Amendment)—has gone the way of the rotary phone.

Catholic adoption agencies in Boston, Washington DC, and Illinois have been shut down by the government for insisting on placing kids in families with a married mother and father. Catholic business owners nationwide are now required to provide their employees with health plans that cover contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. Across the country, Christian florists, bakers, and photographers have been investigated and even fined by government agencies for declining to serve same-sex weddings on the basis of their religious beliefs.

If Americans are no longer free to operate a private business without being forced by the government to provide services that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs, the question is not whether America respects religious freedom anymore. The question is whether America is America anymore. After all, this was the first nation on earth to be founded not upon an ethnicity but upon a set of ideas. If those ideas are now defunct, then this is, in some fundamental sense, another country.

While First Amendment rights long held to be sacrosanct are trumped by novelties like same-sex marriage and free birth control, Americans are still free to obtain late-term abortions, which are only legal in three other countries in the world: North Korea, China, and Canada. Unlike religious freedom, this right is apparently inviolable.

Twenty-three years ago, Pope John Paul II wrote, “A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.” What was at the time dismissed by many as alarmism now has the ring of prophecy.

————————

Michael Schuttloffel is the executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference.

About

Our Work

Publications

Join Us

The Population Research Institute is 501(c)(3) • Made with in the Shenandoah Valley • Site development by Wineskin Websites.

All of our PRI articles, unless otherwise noted, are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives license. You are free to reproduce these articles, as long as you do not change them, and you credit us as follows: “Population Research Institute, http://pop.org”. All the rest of the material on this site, such as pages, screens, and images, are under copyright by Population Research Institute. Please contact us for information on reuse. People pictured on this site do not thereby express agreement with our views.